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06-25-08

Click on picture below for print quality version.

ISU professors Ann Marie Fiore (left) and Linda Niehm
(right) share a laugh with a customer during the "After Hours" event in Mathew Carper/Marjie's Menageries, one of the four businesses
included in the "Main Street Oskaloosa" makeover project they assisted in.
Photo
by R.J. Jarvis II, Communication Research Institute of William Penn
University

ISU faculty are creating a rural renaissance community index to
curb out-migration

AMES, Iowa -- Recent floods have devastated significant portions of Iowa,
and yet a greater long term consequence, particularly in rural areas, may be
a flood of citizens moving out of state.

A group of 12 Iowa State University researchers is working on a
three-year project designed to stop the flood of Iowa's most precious
resource -- its human capital. The rural renaissance community index is
designed to identify some of the greatest attributes found in rural Iowa
communities through an interactive database. In the process, the index will
provide some of the recently flooded towns and cities with a blueprint of
how best to build and strengthen infrastructures that could stimulate future
business and population growth.

"This is really rural community revitalization, across the board," said
Ann Marie Fiore, a professor in Iowa State's apparel, educational studies
and hospitality management (AESHM) program and a co-lead investigator on the
project.

The Iowa State researchers are using secondary data from the U.S. Census
Bureau, Department of Education and the Department of Natural Resources, as
well as primary data from focus groups of community leaders in five
successful rural communities -- Decorah, Iowa Falls, Le Mars, Muscatine and
Spirit Lake -- to build their community index.

"The hard part was developing the focus groups, which required that we
identify what communities within Iowa we should study," Fiore said. "We
started with our first 129 communities from our study and said, 'OK of
these, which are really doing the best?' So we looked at issues such as
population growth within those communities and economic pull-factors and
whether they were doing well economically. We also looked at cities that
seem creative and really have a large creative class."

In search of the creative class

In his best-selling book "The Rise of the Creative Class," author Richard
Florida defines the "creative class" as a group rich in human capital that
includes entrepreneurs and those paid to do creative work -- scientists,
engineers, artists, musicians, designers and knowledge-based professionals.
Florida, who spoke at ISU last fall, theorizes that rural communities
(populations under 50,000) must maintain and further develop community
lifestyle infrastructural and cultural features that sustain and attract the
creative class.

The Iowa State researchers were studying their focus group communities
for those same creative class features.

"We looked at whether there was something positive economically going on
in a community, then we looked at whether there was this nucleus of creative
class people and what had drawn them," said Linda Niehm, also a professor in
the AESHM program and a co-lead investigator. "What are those community
attractiveness factors that appeal to the creative class?"

"What we can't forget is that it's the schools and it's the natural
environment. These things also attract people to the community," Fiore said.
"So it's really important that you have a good downtown with businesses that
attract people in terms of restaurants and retail. But a lot of what we
heard from our focus groups was this idea of 'I want someplace that I can go
and play with my kids and go to the park.'"

The ISU project also addresses Iowa's brain drain problem -- the loss of
educated young people, particularly from rural areas, to other states. The
researchers conducted focus groups with graduating Iowa State students from
rural communities, representing at least three majors from each of the six
undergraduate colleges.

Plans for an interactive Web site by Spring 2009

Fiore says there are plans to convert the data into an interactive rural
renaissance community index Web site by Spring 2009. The site will be
designed to benefit leaders from other rural Iowa communities, defining
elements they may want to consider adding to their towns to stimulate future
growth.

"We have the data for the index -- that's all been collected. But we now
need the funds to create a tangible Web site -- the product or vehicle for
delivery," she said.

"This information isn't going to be static, so if these communities have
a demographic change or the addition of a new industry, we'd like to have a
link from this Web site to that community for some augmentation of that
information," Niehm said.

The project is an outgrowth of work Fiore, Niehm and other ISU faculty
and students have conducted in the "Main Street Iowa" project, a
comprehensive approach to downtown revitalization within the state,
sponsored by the Iowa Department of Economic Development.

The initial seed money to fund the rural renaissance community index
project's first year was provided by the Entrepreneurial Program Initiative
from ISU's College of Human Sciences. The researchers will summarize their
first-year research in a report to the college later this summer.

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Quick look

A group of 12 Iowa State University researchers is working on a three-year
rural renaissance community index project designed to identify some of the greatest attributes found in rural Iowa communities through an
interactive database. They are using data from the U.S. Census Bureau,
Department of Education, the Department of Natural Resources, and focus groups of community leaders in five successful rural
communities -- Decorah, Iowa Falls, Le Mars, Muscatine and Spirit Lake -- to
build the index.